Re: Performance tip to load any application faster.

WRT this being "KDE-only", I think it might be helpful to state that it should work by opening any Qt application that has a text entry control. I did it with VBox, and I'm in a mostly-GTK environment.

Re: Performance tip to load any application faster.

@egan: The article in the first post has this:

For those curious about what is going on here, this enables an optimization which Lubos (of general KDE speediness fame) came up with some time ago and was then rewritten and integrated into libx11. Ordinarily on startup applications read input method information from /usr/share/X11/locale/<your locale>/Compose. This Compose file is quite long (>5000 lines for the en_US.UTF-8 one) and takes some time to process. libX11 can create a cache of the parsed information which is much quicker to read subsequently, but it will only re-use an existing cache in /var/cache/libx11/compose or create a new one in ~/.compose-cache if the directory already exists.

Re: Performance tip to load any application faster.

I'm amazed! I run Openbox standalone. I tried this out, created ~/.compose-cache/ and started Virtualbox so that a file was created in that directory. After that all programs started much faster. I always shutdown the computer at night, and when I booted up this morning, all programs I used (Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Thunar, Lxterminal, Leafpad, Geany) started slower again. I restarted them several times, and it was not only the first time after reboot. Then I started Virtualbox - and after that all the other was much faster again.

Is there a command one can put in autostart that will have the same effekt, instead of having to start Virtualbox for this to take effekt?

Re: Performance tip to load any application faster.

Re: Performance tip to load any application faster.

Interesting, I will have to try this. /wonders why it isn't enabled by default in KDE

Edit: tried it with Opera. As far as I can tell it creates no perceptible improvement... But do please keep in mind that I'm posting from a Thinkpad 600E, with an almighty Pentium II processor and 192 MB of RAM (plus 128 MB of zram cache and no swap space at all). Results may be somewhat better on faster computers.

Edit again: okay, tried it on KDE on my netbook. The improvement in load times is completely imperceptible. However, it does seem to put a dent in the chronically awful Qt4 redraw performance, since resizing stuff under KWin no longer has me shuffling about and twiddling my thumbs in impatience.